Ernst Theodorowitsch Krenkel

Krenkel 1973 on a postage stamp of the USSR on the occasion of his 70th birthday

QSL card R1AEM from 2013 in honor of Ernst Krenkel, RAEM, on display with his HRO radio receiver

Representation of the two radio stations he operates in the Arctic

Ernst Krenkel (russ. Эрнст Теодорович Кренкель ; born December 11 ^{. Jul} / 24. December 1903 ^greg. In Tartu , † 8. December 1971 in Moscow ) was a Soviet polar explorers and radio operator .

Life

Ernst Krenkel was born in 1903 as the son of the language teacher Theodor Krenkel and his wife Maria, who was also of German descent. His ancestors on his father's side immigrated to Ukraine from Thuringia in the 18th century .

Krenkel worked on various polar stations between 1924 and 1938 . He was involved in the construction of the world's northernmost radio station in the Arctic on Franz-Joseph-Land and on January 12, 1930, he established the world record for long-distance connections on shortwave when he established a connection to radio operator Howard Mason at Byrd's WFA station Antarctic Expedition under Byrd on the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf . In 1931 he took part in the polar flight of the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin airship .

When Krenkel took part in the Cheliuskin voyage in 1934 , he used his radio to notify the outside world of the uncontrolled drift of the survivors on an ice floe after the ship's sinking. He was able to save the expedition through contact with radio amateurs after the ice floe broke several times . After the expedition he was allowed to keep the ship's call sign RAEM as an amateur radio call sign for his amateur radio station .

From May 1937 to February 1938, Krenkel was a radio operator alongside Iwan Papanin , Pyotr Schirschow and Evgeni Fyodorov on the North Pole-1 ice drift station and thus probably one of the first people at the geographic North Pole .

He was the first president of the Radio Sports Association of the Soviet Union, the forerunner of today's Union of Radio Amateurs of Russia .

Ernst Krenkel found his final resting place in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. On the grave, the letters RAEM stand on a high stele in large capitals one below the other.

Honors

His portrait is featured on numerous Soviet and Russian postage stamps. Together with his colleagues at the ice station, he was honored with the title Hero of the Soviet Union . As a reminder, several stations are operated by radio amateurs beyond the Arctic Circle, through connections with these stations the RAEM diploma can be obtained.

It was also named after him

the Krenkel Bay , an extended bay of the Laptev on the southeast coast of the island Komsomolez in the archipelago Severnaya Zemlya (80 ° 30'N, 98 ° E);
the geophysical polar observatory ET Krenkel on Hayes Island in the Franz-Joseph-Land archipelago , Arkhangelsk Oblast (80 ° 36 ′ 36 ′ ′ N, 57 ° 49 ′ 22 ′ ′ E).

literature

Ernst Krenkel: My callsign is RAEM [ RAEM - мои позывные ; in Dt. transfer by Leon Nebenzahl - abbreviated for the German edition], Verlag Neues Leben , Berlin 1977, 474 pp.

Web links

Commons : Ernst Krenkel - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ North Pole Drifting Stations (1930s – 1980s) Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution , accessed February 11, 2015

personal data
SURNAME	Krenkel, Ernst Theodorowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Кренкель, Эрнст Теодорович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Soviet polar explorer and radio operator
DATE OF BIRTH	December 24, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH	Tartu
DATE OF DEATH	December 8, 1971
Place of death	Moscow

[1] North Pole Drifting Stations (1930s – 1980s) Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution , accessed February 11, 2015